In September 1301, the king of Aragon, James II, wrote urgently to his treasurer commanding him to get the royal Librum medicine vocatum Avicenne out of pawn. He had allowed his favourite surgeon to pawn the volume with a Barcelona merchant for 500 sueldos, but now he found a "valda necessarium" and had to have it back. Five hundred sueldos was an enormous amount, the price of fifty meters of Persian cloth, of a good mule or of a horse and not even the royal treasury always found such sums easy to produce.

The king had to repeat his order for the book's redemption for months to come. This volume, on which the king placed so much store, can only have been Avicenna's Canon, the great medical encyclopaedia of Ibn Sina, translated into Latin in the twelfth century.*

Translation is the complex process of transferring the components of a message from one language and culture into another language and culture. These components can be in the form of "language" (most of the time) or colors, shapes, sounds, etc. For the transfer process to succeed, all ingredients of the original message should be clear and well defined.

In 1964, the U.S. Government established the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) to evaluate the progress of Computational Linguistics and the potentials of Machine Translation (MT). After two years of research, the seven scientists-Committee issues its famous report questioning the results achieved in the field of MT and calling for more research in Computational Linguistics. The recommendations of the Committee lead the U.S. Government to reduce seriously its funding.

Twenty years ago, linguists, anthropologists and many scholars from different disciplines were anxiously discussing ways to slow down the rhythm in which many languages are vanishing. English language had invaded since decades many parts of the world as the language of education, business and communication.